Yeah...total mincing fancy-boy pussyfart there.

A kilt is not a skirt.

As much as I may dislike the Scots in general, them being a rather dimwitted and lazy group of people for the most part....responsible for flooding our shores with what became our scourge, the hillbillies......the act of wearing a kilt is perfectly acceptable in certain situations.

Gay orgy, Policeman's Ball, World's Dumbest Man Competition....etc..

If you wanna be as sensible as you can while still using AC (which is innately not very sensible unless you're going to die without it or something), you should always have the fan on as high a speed as you can tolerate and the temperature setting on as warm a setting as you can tolerate. With the temperature on the coldest setting and the fan on the lowest setting, you're making the car do all that extra work, the *maximum* extra work it can be made to do AC-wise, and then with the fan on the lowest setting, you're seeing as little benefit from that extra work as you possibly can. I bet most people haven't thought this through.

AC on with the windows down has its own degrees of r-tardedness. If you're talking about having the windows cracked an inch or two (to smoke, for example) that's not really gonna set you back a whole lot, mpg-wise. If you have the fan on a high speed, it's creating a higher air pressure inside the cabin that is in its nature going to push out the cracked windows, thus you're not really letting hot air in so much as you're letting some amount of the cold air escape. Yes, some hot air comes in, but it's nothing terrible if the fan's cranked. If you're talking about windows all the way down, arm out the window kinda thing, then yeah, that's getting kinda absurd.

But the bottom line is, the point of AC is not to save the planet, it's to make you feel comfortable. If you feel most comfortable with the windows open a little or a lot, then that's that. You're already destroying the world by driving the car, and you're destroying it more by using the AC, we're all destroying it by buying what we buy from the stores we buy it from etc etc. It's all about degrees. Whatever you're cool with (no pun intended) then that's what you've got.

And again, anytime you're operating your AC with the fan on any speed but the very highest, you're being more wasteful than you need to.

You wanna know what's a huge waste of energy? In the wintertime, when it's below freezing outside, we all use electricity to power the compressor in our fridge and freezer. There's an abundance of sub-zero air outside, and rather than having fridges that have a vent to the outside that take advantage of that free cold air, we run what is essentially an AC unit, inside our home, nonstop, all winter long.

What a complete and total waste of energy, just a pure, pointless waste of energy. And I'm guessing damn near every single person who lives somewhere cold is doing this every winter of their whole life.

I only wish I could run both the heater and the AC full blast at the same time